Critic's Choice: New DVDs

By Dave Kehr

Published: March 27, 2007

Muriel

The French filmmaker Alain Resnais had two highly influential international hits in a row, ''Hiroshima Mon Amour'' (1959) and ''Last Year at Marienbad'' (1961), and then struck out with his 1963 feature, ''Muriel'' (''A very bewildering, annoying film,'' Bosley Crowther, The New York Times). From today's perspective ''Murial'' looks like the highest accomplishment of his early work.

The revolutionary style of those first two films, with their enigmatic, nonlinear narratives hopscotching through time and space, gave way in ''Muriel'' to a more naturalistic surface: characters with full names and complete psychologies, anchored in a particular place (the northern resort town of Boulogne-sur-Mer), and time (the politically tense early '60s, with the Algerian war raging off-screen as well as deep in the characters' psyches), and a story that seems to have a beginning, a middle and an end, exactly in that old-fashioned order.

But the smooth surface, as in Mr. Resnais's later films, proves to be only a thin veneer of rationality applied to the chaotic and contradictory jumble of memories and emotions that are, for him, the essence of human consciousness. The title itself opens the first gap: Muriel is not a presence in this film named after her, but instead a conspicuous absence.

She is, or was, an Algerian insurgent whose torture and death were witnessed by Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thi??, a nervous, remote young man who has returned from his military service to live with his stepmother, H?ne (Delphine Seyrig, sublime), in the cramped modern apartment that also serves as the showroom for her antique furniture business.

The plot is set in motion when H?ne receives a visit from the aging charmer Alphonse (Jean-Pierre K?en), her fianc?efore the Occupation, whom she hasn't seen since; Alphonse shows up with a young woman, Fran?se, whom he introduces as his niece but is clearly his mistress. As H?ne and Alphonse rekindle their relationship, Fran?se is drawn to the troubled Bernard, who is obsessed with the lost Muriel and the horrors of war she represents.

''Muriel'' is, then, a film set entirely in the present, which means, in Mr. Resnais's terms, that it is entirely concerned with the past. The dense screenplay is by the poet Jean Cayrol, a Resistance fighter and camp survivor whose work was the basis of ''Night and Fog,'' Mr. Resnais's momentous 1955 documentary about Auschwitz.

Boulogne itself is only a modern facade covering an old trauma. The city, a ''ville martyre,'' was almost leveled by Allied bombing in World War II, and its new buildings are just placeholders for the old, which continue to exist in the characters' memory. Bernard lives in the cave of his guilty conscience, H?ne in her rooms full of romantic antiques, surrounded by borrowed memories.

Alphonse ceaselessly talks about the hotel he owned in Algiers before the war drove him out, and only Fran?se, the innocent, seems to have any notion of a future for herself. (She wants to be an actress.)

Mr. Resnais evokes memories of the cinema too, casting Jean Dast?the handsome young boatman of Jean Vigo's masterpiece ''L'Atalante'' (1934) as a hermit who lives near a sea cliff. For Mr. Resnais, as for William Faulkner: ''The past is never dead. It's not even past.'' A major film returns, thanks to the good graces of Koch Lorber Films, and just in time to prove a memory background to Mr. Resnais's latest feature, ''Private Fears in Public Places,'' which opens on April 13 in New York. ($24.98, not rated)

The Burmese Harp

Kon Ichikawa's Japanese antiwar parable ''The Burmese Harp'' (1956) may look sentimental today, particularly in light of end-of-empire films like Shohei Imamura's bracingly cynical ''Pigs and Battleships'' (1961) and Yasuzo Masumura's ''Red Angel'' (1966). But it has a clarity of purpose and a simplicity of execution that make it still appealing.

Shoji Yasui is quietly moving as Mizushima, a Japanese private who during the retreat from Burma resolves to stay behind as a monk and help to bury the thousands of Japanese dead still littering the countryside.

The film is told from the point of view of Mizushima's sympathetic and ultimately awe-struck commander, a captain (Rentaro Mikuni) who begs Mizushima to return with the troops to Japan, only to lose him in the mountains. Mizushima's final farewell is filmed from a discreet distance, and is all the more moving for it. Criterion is issuing a new digital transfer of this title, accompanied by Mr. Ichikawa's more graphic and brutal follow-up, ''Fires on the Plain'' (1959). (Criterion Collection, $29.95, not rated)

The Errol Flynn Signature Collection: Volume 2

Moving beyond the obligatory titles of ''The Errol Flynn Signature Collection: Volume 1,'' this box-set sequel from Warner Home Video offers some rare and underappreciated Flynn vehicles. The crucial title here is Raoul Walsh's 1942 ''Gentleman Jim,'' a biography of the boxer James J. Corbett (Flynn) that provides perfect material for Walsh's fascination with restless, driven, overachieving and ultimately self-destructive personalities. (It's a slightly more benign version of his ''White Heat.'')

But the set also offers two magnificently shot films by Michael Curtiz, one of the greatest of the studio technicians: the historical epic ''The Charge of the Light Brigade,'' from 1936, and the World War II propaganda film ''Dive Bomber'' (1941). Both ''Dive Bomber'' and Vincent Sherman's ''Adventures of Don Juan'' (1948) are presented in excellent Technicolor restorations; ''Don Juan,'' in particular, is one of the great showcases for three-strip Technicolor, with its inspired photography by Elwood Bredell, art direction by Edward Carrere and costume design by Marjorie Best.

And then there is Edmund Goulding's competent remake of ''The Dawn Patrol'' (1938), though I hope Warner eventually releases the original Howard Hawks version of 1930. (Warner Home Video, $49.98, not rated)

Also Out Today

'HAPPY FEET' -- George Miller's computer-animated, tap-dancing penguins come to home video in both widescreen and pan-and-scan editions. (Warner Home Video, $28.98, PG)

'THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS' -- Will Smith works for a better life for himself and his young son (Jaden Christopher Syre Smith) in an inspirational drama by the Italian director Gabriele Muccino (''The Last Kiss''). (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $28.95, PG-13)

'CHILDREN OF MEN' -- Alfonso Cuar? dystopian fantasy (based on the novel by P. D. James) about a future world in which children are, literally, inconceivable. With Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and a couple of the most amazing long takes you will ever see. Also available in widescreen and pan-and-scan editions. (Universal, $29.98, R)